What is public affairs?
Public affairs is the practice of maintaining relationships with your organisation’s stakeholders, particularly those in the political sphere. At Higginson Strategy, the goal of our public affairs work is to influence and align policymakers, politicians and leaders with your ambitions to create purpose-driven change.
Higginson Strategy’s team of former political advisors and national journalists will use their broad network of contacts and wealth of experience to ensure that your organisation generates conversation and action for all the right reasons.
We are highly experienced in using a range of different public affairs tools, including events, strategic media activations, high-level meetings, open letters and petitions. We combine these tools with high-level media activation to create effective and compelling campaigns.
1 – Strategy
Firstly, Higginson Strategy’s team work with you to align on your objectives and develop a strategy fit for your ambitions.
Based on this, we will devise a detailed stakeholder map and plan of action, prepared within a calendar, to demonstrate each step and each desired outcome.
2 – Execution
Your Higginson Strategy account team will then get to work on delivering the agreed strategy, contacting sympathetic stakeholders and working together to build momentum behind your campaign objectives.
Your account team will provide full briefings on any developments relevant to your ambitions and provide comprehensive introductions ahead of meetings with external stakeholders. The team will also regularly liaise with your organisation to ensure that you remain aligned in terms of agreed outcomes.
3 – Reporting
Throughout the process, your Higginson Strategy team will report back with updates on the progress of your campaign, providing opportunities to adjust activity accordingly.
Higginson Strategy will evaluate the progress of your campaign in terms of clearly measurable outcomes and evaluate these against your long-term goals to ensure the campaign delivers accordingly.
Case Studies
WASPI
Challenge: WASPI – Women Against State Pension Inequality, campaigns for women born in the 1950s who were affected by the failure of the Department for Work and Pensions to communicate changes about increases to the State Pension age. Higginson supported WASPI by launching a media and public affairs campaign, supported by a political events strategy.
Solution: Higginson Strategy commissioned specialist analysis of mortality data, to highlight the rapidity with which the affected women are dying: one every thirteen minutes. Higginson Strategy leveraged the shock factor of these fresh statistics as the hook for both a fringe event at the Labour Party Conference and a parliamentary roundtable.
To follow this, Higginson Strategy organised leading private briefing events in Parliament for Labour and Conservative MPs, working with Co-Chairs of the APPG to lead actions for MPs. Attendance secured by both respective DWP teams. Alongside this, Higginson Strategy led WASPI’s engagement with target seat candidates at the Liberal Democrats’ 2023 conference, organising a special briefing lunch for candidates and attracting some 20 high-level attendees.
Higginson Strategy also commissioned a letter-writing campaign to Labour MPs, ahead of Sunak’s new government’s first DWP Questions, which secured three questions from MPs and a meeting with the Pensions Minister.
Outcome: The consistent media coverage and political activation have maintained political pressure on both major parties by sustaining WASPI in the conversation. The final report by the Parliamentary and Health Justice Ombudsman, and surrounding media coverage, ensured that the political parties cannot say ‘no’ to compensation.
A Plastic Planet
Challenge: In February 2017 campaign group A Plastic Planet was founded by two campaigners determined to create a world free from single-use plastic pollution. With zero media coverage and zero public profile, the issue of plastic pollution had yet to become one of the salient environmental policy issues of the day.
Solution: Over a period of seven years, Higginson Strategy helped A Plastic Planet become one of the UK’s leading environmental NGOs through leadership communications, big-bang campaigns and lobbying tactics. The campaign has launched the world’s first plastic-free encyclopedia, trialled plastic-free supermarket aisles, united a coalition of health scientists at the Global Plastics Treaty, and celebrated securing a ban on single-use cosmetics sachets in the UK following its #SackTheSachet campaign. Most recently, the campaign launched its ‘Roadmap to a Plastic Free Future’ at Labour Party Conference outlining a series of bans over ten years to phase out single-use plastics.
Outcome: Working with Higginson Strategy, A Plastic Planet won changes to the law such as implementing plans to ban waste exports to non-OECD countries and single use plastic bans in the UK and EU.
Clean Air Bill
Challenge: Following its launch in 2019, Nature 2030 turned its attention to the issue of air pollution and ensuring an ambitious legally binding target on emissions was instated in UK law.
Solution: Nature 2030 collaborated with Rosamund Adoo-Kissi-Debrah to demand a Clean Air Bill, granting clean air as a human right to all Britons.
Result: Nature 2030 successfully delivered policy and public relations support for the bill, which featured in the Queen’s Speech in 2020, and later in the Environment Bill 2021.
Our Public Affairs Experts
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Clodagh Higginson
Partner
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Alex Davies
Director
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